Ordensreform und Konziliarismus: Der Franziskanerprovinzial Matthias Döring (1427-1461) (review)

life, McGuire’s careful balancing act is, I would judge, successful. Somewhat less successful, however, is the balance he achieves between the depth and rigor of his analyses of Gerson’s own writings and his somewhat uneven handling of the contextual background against which they are seen. Thus it is impossible to grasp the full significance of Gerson’s clash with Gorel on the matter of mendicant privileges without seeing it in the context of the great mendicant-secular controversy at Paris in the 1250’s or the seventeenth-century struggle in France to vindicate the divinely-established hierarchical status of the parochial clergy. Nor can it convincingly be claimed that “Gerson’s last contributions at Constance have for the most part been ignored” (p. 281). After all, the first blow struck in the great war of words surrounding the Venetian interdict of 1606 was the republication in Italian translation of two of Gerson’s tracts from 1418—his Resolutio circa materiam excommunicationum et irregularitatum and his De sententia pastoris semper tenenda.That blow was struck by the acerbic Venetian theologian Paolo Sarpi, and it had the effect of drawing down on him (and on the memory of Gerson) the ire of none other than Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. Nor, again, is it altogether accurate to assert that after 1706 Gerson was to become something of a parochial figure, “celebrated by French academics and more or less forgotten elsewhere” (p. 318). He figures large, after all, in the De statu ecclesiae which the auxiliary bishop of Trier (writing under the pseudonym of “Febronius”) was to publish in 1763 and which was soon to be a best seller, circulated all over Europe in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese translations. Nor was Gerson unknown to the recusant “Anglo-Gallicans” of late-eighteenth-century England or, across the Atlantic, to their “Cisalpine” fellow-travellers in the newly-independent United States.